Senior Field Engineer, France

Elsewhere this job is called Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect or Pre-Sales Engineer. The level follows your background: Senior or Principal.

Location: Remote, from anywhere in France
Contract: Full-time, CDI
Team: Field Engineering, 6 engineers worldwide, reporting to our Lead Field Engineer
Languages: French and English, both fluent
What Kestra is

• An open-source orchestration platform. One control plane for everything that runs inside a company: data pipelines, infrastructure automation, business processes, and now AI agents.

• We replace tools you already know, and we name them: VMware vRA, Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Camunda, Control-M, Automic, AWS Step Functions...

• Around a hundred very large groups run Kestra in production today, on workloads they cannot afford to lose.

• $25M Series A in March 2026, led by RTP Global with Alven, ISAI and Axeleo, alongside founders from Datadog, dbt Labs and Hugging Face.

• Three editions: Open Source, Enterprise (self-hosted, event-driven, distributed HA) and Cloud.

Why this job exists

Our French accounts are among our largest and most demanding: banks, insurers, industrial groups, energy, retail. These are not pilots on a side project. They are orchestration migrations that touch thousands of servers and the processing chains the business depends on.

The engineering is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the six months between "this looks promising" and "our production runs on it": mapping a setup nobody fully documented, agreeing in writing what success means, convincing the architect who was perfectly happy with the old tool, becoming the person a CTO calls first.

We are opening this job in France because those accounts deserve an engineer in their timezone, in their language, who can be in the room.

What you will do

Before the contract

• Technical discovery with the Account Executive: what runs today, what it costs, what breaks, who owns it, and who inside the company would rather nothing changed.

• You own the evaluation. Our POCs are deliberately tight: one scoping session, 2 or 3 use cases with success criteria written down, self-hosted, no data leaving the customer's environment, 2 to 3 weeks start to finish. You write the success plan and you answer for the verdict.

• You build the demo. Not a slide deck of one: a running environment, their data shape, their constraints.

• You design the target architecture and defend it in front of architects who have already picked their favourite.

• You make the case against the tool in place. We are not subtle about this: when a prospect runs Control-M, vRA or a fleet of Airflow instances, we say what we replace and why.

After the contract

• Onboarding and training. The onboarding and follow-up framework is this team's own work, built over the past year. You use it and you sharpen it.

• Escalations on your accounts: diagnose with our core engineers, keep the customer informed while the situation is unresolved, then document the cause and build the automated check that prevents the next one.

• Quarterly architecture reviews with the people who operate Kestra day to day.

• The next use case. Most of our growth comes from a fifth team inside an existing customer discovering they can put their own processing on the platform.

• The voice of the field inside Product. Our PMs prioritise on what you bring back, so bring it back with evidence.

With the community and the product

• Answer open-source users on Slack and GitHub. Several of our largest customers started as someone asking a question there.

• Write what outlives the call: blueprints, how-to guides, migration notes, short videos.

• Speak at meetups and webinars if you want to. An option, not an obligation.

What you touch every week

Kubernetes, Terraform or OpenTofu, Docker, YAML (our flows are declarative YAML), Git and GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, and the security basics of an enterprise deployment: RBAC, secrets, network isolation, air-gapped installs. Plus whichever of Python, SQL, dbt, Spark or Kafka the account in front of you runs on.

What your first year looks like

Month 1. Kestra Enterprise running on your own cluster, one full migration done end to end in a lab, and you have sat in on discovery calls and at least one escalation.

Month 3. Two or three accounts of your own, and your first evaluation run solo.

Month 12. A portfolio of French accounts, some of them among our largest. Account teams route architecture questions to you by default, and at least one chapter of the Field Engineering playbook has your name on it.

What we are looking for

This is a senior job. We do not train the technical half here, and we will not put someone in front of a CAC 40 architecture committee for the first time.

Required

• A high, verifiable technical level. You write production code, you debug someone else's, and you know what happens inside a Kubernetes cluster when it goes wrong. Operations, not demonstrations.

• Time in a startup or scale-up funded at Series A, B or C. Not a prestige criterion: in those companies nobody catches things behind you. You have held a scope alone, with no support team underneath and no process written in advance. That is exactly this job.

• Long tenures. At least two roles of 2 years or more, in companies whose systems have measurable size. A string of twelve-month stops tells us nothing about your ability to finish what you start.

• Complex projects you owned yourself, not ones you attended. A migration, a rebuild, a critical go-live: you can walk through the scope, the constraints, what broke, and what you decided at that moment.

• You have been alone in front of a customer. Workshop, POC, technical committee, incident. This job is as much consultant as engineer, and the consultant half cannot be improvised.

• Depth in at least one of: data engineering (production pipelines, dbt, Spark, Snowflake, DuckDB); platform and IaC (Terraform or OpenTofu, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and the internal politics of a platform team); AI and MLOps (LLM lifecycle, vector databases, models out of notebooks into production, agent orchestration under governance).

• You have operated or replaced an orchestrator: Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Control-M, Automic, vRA, Step Functions, or cron at industrial scale. You know the subject from the inside, not from a comparison table.

• Flawless French, and English good enough to argue about architecture with engineers spread across several countries.

• You explain the same architecture twice: once to a CTO, once to a junior analyst, and both walk away with it.

Appreciated

• Pre-sales or field experience at a software vendor.

• Regulated or constrained environments: banking, insurance, energy, defence. Air-gapped deployments, EU data sovereignty, RBAC and audit as opening questions rather than afterthoughts.

• A public trace: open-source contributions, talks, technical writing.

• A third language, German above all.

Why leave a large vendor for this

In pre-sales at a company of several thousand people, you know the ceiling: you prove the product, then you hand the account over, and the architecture you argued for is executed by someone else. Here the same person runs the evaluation, designs the target architecture, and stays on the account for the three years that follow. Six field engineers cover the world, so what you decide becomes the method rather than a local exception. And the product is open source: you can read the code you sell, open an issue, and watch it get fixed by someone you speak to every week.

The hard parts

We would rather you read this now than find out in month three.

• You will sometimes be the only technical person a customer trusts during an incident.

• Some evaluations are lost, and some are lost for reasons that have nothing to do with the product.

• Enterprise migrations are slow. If you need a visible result every two weeks, this job will wear you down.

• The Field Engineering playbook is half written. You will write parts of it while doing the job, not before.

What we offer

• A stated compensation, plus BSPCE band.

• Remote-first, flexible hours, no core-hours theatre.

• A whole-company offsites a year.

• Equipment budget.

• Conference and training budget, and the time to use it.

How we hire

1. 45 minutes with our Lead Field Engineer: your background, the job, your questions.

2. 45 minutes with Emmanuel, our CEO.

How to apply

Send your CV and one page on an orchestration setup you have operated or replaced: what it ran, what broke when it grew, and what you would rebuild differently today. We read the page first.